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Aug 13, 2012 at 11:45 am
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Go Tacoma Dome.
It would be a salve to all bruised egos.
What does The Stranger have against a working waterfront that provides thousands of family wage jobs?.
Beg the question much? It's silly to think that this is a choice between waterfront vitality or an arena unless there's some evidence it back it up. In fact, framing the issue as this choice is exactly why your question and the Port of Seattle's advocacy aren't credible.
The port's activism might be convincing if they could do more than issue skewed messaging polls, recycle speculations we've heard before, and pass off unsubstantiated fear-mongering as reports. Instead, they present a logical fallacy that's easily dismissed.
However, this piece isn't really about the port's claims, but to say that as long as the port lacks evidence to back up those claims, Frame has a good political hit on her opponent.
Instead promise it will be painless and let whoever comes after you pay the bills. By the time the other shoe drops our local pols will have gotten their undersecretary of whatever appointments in the next Democratic administration and won't even remember what they promised.
Yet it's quite true some Port-related businesses, especially at Sea-Tac, remain low-wage and the Port does nothing to help them. I've appreciated that Slog's covered some of those struggles, especially when they had Jake Blumgart on staff for a hot minute that one time.
Many of those workers are stuck in low wage positions with little barganing power, similar to concession workers and luxury skybox waitstaff at sports stadiums.
Also, I now dislike both Frame and Tarleton. Damn.
We need the another SoDo sports structure like we need a Disney theme park.
We should consider levering Seattle's public debt on something that is centered on a forward-looking, carbon neutral mode of production rather than the consumption of cheesy symbolism and the fucktard corporate oligarchy.
So yeah, you go Gael!!!
[ http://www.uwlax.edu/faculty/anderson/mi… ]
Noteworthy claims (among many):
“independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development…
These results stand in distinct contrast to the promotional studies that are typically done by consulting firms under the hire of teams or local chambers of commerce supporting facility development. Typically, such promotional studies project future impact and almost inevitably adopt unrealistic assumptions regarding local value added, new spending, and associated multipliers. They often use a regional input-output model that depends on outdated technical coefficients which are treated as invariant to shifts in supply and demand...
The academic work on the economic impact of sports facilities and teams does not rely upon projection. Rather, it compares the local economic performance of areas with and without stadiums, arenas, and teams, controlling for other variables that affect local economic conditions...cross-section studies, for example...found no significant difference in personal income growth from 1958 to 1987 between 36 metropolitan areas that hosted a team in one of the four premier professional sports leagues and 12 otherwise comparable areas that did not. Looking at 46 cities over the 1990–94 period...higher high school graduation rates and more spending on police are what encouraged economic growth, while the presence of a major league sports team actually put a drag on the local economy.” [103-104]
(don't recommend giving the SPD more money, certainly)
[ http://american.com/archive/2008/april-0… ]
Coates makes a very similar argument that Siegried and Zimablist make (@13):
“The most basic question about stadiums, arenas, and sports franchises is the extent to which they contribute to the vitality of the local economy. Supporters of publicly financed stadiums argue that the benefits are substantial, while opponents say they are small and highly concentrated among the wealthiest citizens. To buttress their case, supporters mostly use economic impact studies that predict how the local economy will be affected by the stadium, while opponents compare the economy before and after the facility is constructed. Supporters tend to imply that redistribution of economic activity from the suburbs or outlying areas of a city to the downtown is desirable, while opponents generally oppose this sort of redistribution and focus instead on job and income creation.
There is little evidence of large increases in income or employment associated with the introduction of professional sports or the construction of new stadiums.
The typical economic impact study gathers data on all aspects of spending related to a stadium, including the money spent to build it and the money spent by fans in connection with the stadium (including on tickets, at restaurants, and at hotels). The impact of this spending ripples outward into other areas of the economy through a multiplier. By linking spending to employment, the study then calculates how many jobs a stadium has created. It does not perform a cost-benefit analysis, which would address the opportunity costs of raising taxes to pay for a stadium and consider alternative uses of those funds.
Academic researchers have examined the prospective economic impact studies and found a variety of methodological errors in them, all of which raise doubts about the magnitude of the predicted spending and job increases. Other scholars use data from multiple years before and after stadium construction to measure the impact of the stadium. These ex post studies reject stadium subsidies as an effective tool for generating local economic development.
My own research…has used perhaps the most extensive data, incorporating yearly observations on per capita personal income, employment, and wages in each of the metropolitan areas that was home to a professional football, basketball, or baseball team between 1969 and the late 1990s. Our analysis tried to determine the consequences of stadium construction and franchise relocations while controlling for other circumstances in the local economy. Scholars…have taken slightly different approaches, but the results are fairly constant from one analysis to another. There is little evidence of large increases in income or employment associated with the introduction of professional sports or the construction of new stadiums.
Indeed, my work with…finds that the professional sports environment—which includes the presence of franchises in multiple sports, the arrival or departure of teams, and stadium construction—may actually reduce local incomes. For example, we found that the overall sports environment reduced per capita personal income, a finding that was new in the economic literature at the time we published it...We also found that, in many local economies, wages and employment in the retail and services sectors have dropped because of professional sports.”
I used just as many facts as the Port,so, I hope everybody feels better.
Max the "clerk" made $150,000 last year according to his testimony to the KC Council.
Mmmm, yes, it's the arena that hasn't been built yet that had 20% of the container business go to T-town.
Things are so good they gave their CEO a 9% increase in his living wage.
The Port needs to look in the mirror.
t's up to Seattle residents and elected officials to determine whether this is a good use of the city's bonding capacity. But one thing seems pretty clear: It's an outstanding deal compared to just about any other stadium or arena deal of the past 20 years — I'd even say it's better than the San Francisco Giants deal for Pac Bell Park, since there the city paid for land acquisition, and here the city would only be paying for part of the land cost.
Not to mention that "a good deal compared to other stadium deals" is like saying that Mars is a thriving garden planet compared to the non-Earth planets in our solar system.